Synthetic Cubism by Crapadilla
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Vladimir Golovin
Administrator |
Synthetic Cubism by Crapadilla http://www.filterforge.com/filters/501.html  |
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| Posted: June 13, 2006 4:07 am | ||||||||||
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Vladimir Golovin
Administrator |
Fantastic work! Reminds me of the works of Russian avant-garde painters of the early XX century. Brilliant. | |||||||||
| Posted: June 13, 2006 4:10 am | ||||||||||
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Vladimir Golovin
Administrator |
Now some bad news:
It is slow. You use a lot of Worley noises (Blocks, Cells, Chaffs etc) and you connect them into HighPass -- this is a very slow combo. The speed can be improved a bit by eliminating the duplicates of Chaffs components in the bottom-right branch -- these 3 components have the same parameters, therefore they can be replaced with a single Chaffs component with three outbound connections -- that will enable our sample cache optimizations. Another problem is not technical but artistic -- while the filter looks great on our standard preview image (life preserver), it doesn't look as good on other images. |
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| Posted: June 13, 2006 4:15 am | ||||||||||
Crapadilla
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Thank you, Vlad! 
Aye it is. I have already optimized the worley noises for speed by tuning their details all the way down. The highpasses, I am afraid, are a necessary evil, as they are essential to the filter, creating the dirty collage look as well as accentuating edges and creating depth. I may try and apply the highpass after reassembling RGB and see whether that works well.
Haha, I forgot to randomize these. I will follow your advice instead and turn them into one.
I noticed that the filter works best on "iconic", high-contrast images with well defined areas of light and shadow, clear composition and simpler color schemes with broad areas of color. It certainly won't work for all images. While I am open to suggestions how to improve the generality of the filter, I am still convinced that one won't be able to avoid choosing the subject image very carefully to get best results. --- Crapadilla says: "Damn you, stupid Mac beta!" |
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| Posted: June 13, 2006 6:01 am | ||||||||||
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Crapadilla
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Check out these... --- Crapadilla says: "Damn you, stupid Mac beta!" |
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| Posted: June 13, 2006 6:04 am | ||||||||||
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trollkind
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Now that is absolutely impressive, I especially love how only one eye of the puppet gawks from behind the circle on the left side. This truly is art out of one button pressed. | |||||||||
| Posted: June 13, 2006 6:08 am | ||||||||||
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Vladimir Golovin
Administrator |
Great example -- please post more! | |||||||||
| Posted: June 13, 2006 6:13 am | ||||||||||
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Vladimir Golovin
Administrator |
I'd suggest to work on color -- currently, the filter basically destroys the color scheme of the original image, but I think it can be kept. Look at the HLS and HSY components in Channels -- they can be used to handle Hue, Lightness and Saturation separately. |
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| Posted: June 13, 2006 6:16 am | ||||||||||
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Crapadilla
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Yeah, some variations of the filter just 'click'! But you can't expect pushing a button and have it spew out the perfect result. Experimentation is the key...
Check this...  --- Crapadilla says: "Damn you, stupid Mac beta!" |
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| Posted: June 13, 2006 6:22 am | ||||||||||
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Vladimir Golovin
Administrator |
Agreed. |
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| Posted: June 13, 2006 6:37 am | ||||||||||
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Crapadilla
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Hmmm. To largely 'destroy' the color scheme of the original actually was my intention. That is exactly what the filter does, it broadly samples colors from the image, destroying the fine color detail as you can see in my first example image. Why? Because the early cubists actually struggled with color and used rather monochromatic color schemes. Even the more colorful cubist paintings have mostly reduced palettes. Anyway, I would be interested in what exactly you have in mind with the HLS and HSY components. Would you kindly elaborate a bit? --- Crapadilla says: "Damn you, stupid Mac beta!" |
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| Posted: June 13, 2006 6:49 am | ||||||||||
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Vladimir Golovin
Administrator |
No, I didn't have anything specific in mind, just wanted to suggest the idea of handling color with these components. For example, you can extract Hue and Saturation channels, posterize them with ToneCurve/Stairs combo, then assemble them back to an image -- this can be used to simplify the color scheme. |
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| Posted: June 13, 2006 7:01 am | ||||||||||
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Crapadilla
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That is definitely worth a look. The current method indeed IS quite brutal with the colors. --- Crapadilla says: "Damn you, stupid Mac beta!" |
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| Posted: June 13, 2006 7:11 am | ||||||||||
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Vladimir Golovin
Administrator |
I've taken a closer look at the way you produce the final color (the Blend component with Color as a blending mode) and it looks fine. Probably I was referring to a specific variation that seemed too discolored to me. |
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| Posted: June 13, 2006 7:11 am | ||||||||||
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Vladimir Golovin
Administrator |
Another example: |
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| Posted: June 13, 2006 7:19 am | ||||||||||
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Vladimir Golovin
Administrator |
Crapa, I've found the root of all evil -- the elevation gradient is destroying the color. This is because only the topmost row of "pixels" is sampled for a gradient. So, in your situation, the final color scheme depends on what colors show up in the topmost row of the Gradient input. We should find a way to avoid this top-row sampling problem.
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| Posted: June 13, 2006 7:27 am | ||||||||||
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Crapadilla
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Aha! If I understand the elevation gradient components workings correctly, then this would be a problem when the elevation input image doesn't spread its pixel values across the full white to black spectrum, right? --- Crapadilla says: "Damn you, stupid Mac beta!" |
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| Posted: June 13, 2006 7:34 am | ||||||||||
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Vladimir Golovin
Administrator |
This would be a problem even for a full-range gradient -- if a color is not represented in the top row of the Gradient input, it is not going to appear in the Elevation gradient. Here's my suggestion -- I've replaced the Elevation Gradient with offset-based distortion, and added a slider to desaturate the image for cases when it is too colorful: Synthetic Cubism c1u.ffxml |
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| Posted: June 13, 2006 8:02 am | ||||||||||
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Crapadilla
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Ok, I checked your alternative version.
The problem I have with your technique is that 'flat' areas with a contiguous value are no longer colored uniformly, which was my intention with the elevation gradient design. Rather, I think I need to replace the offending 5-color-gradient with something that passes along the full spectrum of sampled color. I will have to look into this. Still, it remains unclear to me why the 5-color-gradient only passes along the color 1 information. --- Crapadilla says: "Damn you, stupid Mac beta!" |
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| Posted: June 13, 2006 9:01 am | ||||||||||
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Crapadilla
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Another kind of image that instantly produces nice results without much tweaking. Obviously the palette sampling is still the problem, as the skin tone is gone. --- Crapadilla says: "Damn you, stupid Mac beta!" |
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| Posted: June 13, 2006 10:36 am | ||||||||||
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Vladimir Golovin
Administrator |
5-Color-Gradient passes every color -- the Elevation Gradient just doesn't "ask" for it, except for the topmost row of pixels. Here's our unfinished help article about Elevation Gradient: http://www.filterforge.com/more/help/Components/Gradients/El |
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| Posted: June 13, 2006 10:39 am | ||||||||||
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Crapadilla
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here goes... --- Crapadilla says: "Damn you, stupid Mac beta!" |
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| Posted: June 13, 2006 10:42 am | ||||||||||
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Crapadilla
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Ah! That lightens up the bulb! the gradient is read from left to right only, automatically assuming that every vertical column of pixels contains the same color. Thanks for the help, Vladimir!
Now that can be worked around I think! --- Crapadilla says: "Damn you, stupid Mac beta!" |
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| Posted: June 13, 2006 10:46 am | ||||||||||
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Vladimir Golovin
Administrator |
Excellent |
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| Posted: June 13, 2006 10:50 am | ||||||||||
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Crapadilla
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Sweet! My mistake made it to the help wiki, hehe.  --- Crapadilla says: "Damn you, stupid Mac beta!" |
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| Posted: June 13, 2006 10:52 am | ||||||||||